AQ Khan: How to Live Dangerously

He’s been called the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and a real-life Bond villain and depending on where you’re from, he’s a national hero or was the world’s most dangerous arms dealer - who made a career of selling his knowledge of nuclear weapons. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:09Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:19Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the foreign policy edition.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  That's right. Take it away.

• 1:31Josh Clark?

  Okay, so Chuck, we're talking today. Let me start differently. Chuck.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37Josh Clark?

  Have you ever met AQ Khan?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  I had never heard of AQ Khan.

• 1:42Josh Clark?

  What do you think of him now?

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, seems like a guy that that made a lot of money helping countries develop their nuclear program.

• 1:54Josh Clark?

  Sure, but I think that leaves out some very important stuff. This is in flagrant violation of UN nonproliferation treaties. It was generally illegal and he was even doing it on the side. He had an underground clandestine proliferation network, which is, I mean, that's very few people have ever done that in the world. And then over here in the West, Chuck, he's viewed as a villain. And in other parts of the world, especially Pakistan, where he's from, he's hailed as a hero. He's very complex, complicated, and at the end of the day, he may essentially be generally a fall guy for a much larger cabal of people who are actually doing this.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I guess we can go back and talk a little bit about his, how he got there, right?

• 2:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  He was born in India in 1936 and in 1952 moved to West Pakistan. And he was into metallurgy and studied at a few different universities in a few different countries. He eventually graduated initially in 1960 from the University of Karachi, but then got a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in 1972. In that time, he got married, had a couple of daughters, and then eventually found his way with his family in the early seventies in the Netherlands, working for a company called Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory, which was doing uranium enrichment for another

• 3:30Speaker 02

  company called Urinco, which was a consortium of a few different countries, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. And they were, you know, they were running ultra centrifuges and he was pretty good at snooping around, it seems like.

• 3:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and ultra centrifuge, your centrifuges in general is used to enrich uranium, and you enrich uranium to a certain extent to use for nuclear power. But if you keep going, you can use that enriched uranium for nuclear bombs, right? So I think that these companies were doing this for for power, for power generation. But regardless, he wasn't a particularly like brilliant physicist or metallurgist or anything like that. He was just kind of a dude. He just had a will that was unlike other people's typically. So when he started out, he had a very low level security clearance. But he very quickly like started making waves and catching the attention of the Dutch

• 4:28Josh Clark?

  intelligence agencies for asking a lot of questions that did not have much of anything to do with the work he was supposed to be doing.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they started monitoring him. And this is something that kind of continued at least as far as Dutch intelligence. And then, you know, eventually other countries would start monitoring as well because, you know, like I said, he got pretty good at snooping around. And in 1971, there was a conflict between East and West Pakistan. And that led to a pretty brief war with India. And just for our purposes, what that eventually meant was Khan and a lot of Pakistan were kind of humiliated at the whole thing and were like, we're still under the thumb of India here. And kind of just sort of got

• 5:19Speaker 02

  that, I guess, national Pakistani pride going as, you know, wanting to get out from under that thumb.

• 5:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I saw that in that 13 day war, Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force, and a third of its army. So it was very much a humiliating defeat. And yeah, I saw that up to this point, AQ Khan was just a generally average person, but that seemed to have really started to get him going. So he decided he was going to use what expertise he had to help build a bomb for Pakistan. He wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfar Ali Bhutto, who was running the show at the time and said, hey, I want to help build a nuclear bomb for Pakistan. We clearly need one. And if you step back and look at it, Chuck, like this is just some random dude

• 6:12Josh Clark?

  that the Prime Minister had never heard of, who wrote him a letter and said, like, hey, let's build a bomb. And I heard the first time he was ignored and the second time they're like, all right, let's see what this guy has to say.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because he was lobbying for uranium and that was his expertise was enriching uranium. And at the time, Pakistan was trying to enrich and produce plutonium. And he was like, that's not the way uranium is the way to go. And just a couple of months after that, Bhutto met with him. And over about the next 11 or 12 months, Khan was like, all right, I'm going to make a little grocery shopping list of what we need, the parts that we need to get a nuclear program started here in earnest. And I'm going to make a list of companies and suppliers and who can get us this stuff. And he basically got all of this information while he was working for that Dutch company.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Like, you know, making copies of blueprints and sneaking them out and supply lists, suppliers lists and stuff like that.

• 7:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he was very well known around the office for being like making copies.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:15Josh Clark?

  So he, well, I just dated myself. Can we just do a little science minute off to the side?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 7:23Josh Clark?

  So you said that, that there was a course that Pakistan was already on for making a bomb out of plutonium, right? AQ Khan was all about enriching uranium. Those are two routes you can use to make a nuclear bomb. And the background and training Khan had was in uranium enrichment. And he loved to like talk trash about plutonium and the people in Pakistan running the plutonium program. But just the upshot of it is this, if you want to get weapons grade uranium, you need about 90% pure uranium. In nature, the U235 uranium that you're looking for occurs about three quarters of a percent of any.

• 8:05Josh Clark?

  Natural lump of uranium. So there's two ways to get that purified U235. One is enrichment, where you spin it in centrifuges that go so fast that it actually separates the different kinds of uranium isotopes. And then you just kind of siphon off the stuff you want. Or with plutonium, you bombard it with neutrons so that uranium 238 eventually turns into 239, decays into neptunium, and then plutonium. They're both like great ways of creating nuclear material to blow up the world with, but they're just two totally different tracks.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we did a whole episode on that. If you're interested in like the finer details, seek that one out.

• 8:45Josh Clark?

  Was that the one that we did after Fukushima?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know, but we did a whole episode on how to, that whole process. I can't remember what it was called, though.

• 8:54Josh Clark?

  Well, I can't help but talk about it. I love that for some reason. It really like tickles me.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in October of 75, the Dutch authorities who had been watching him this whole time, noting all this sort of suspicious stuff that he was doing at work, said, uh, all right, we're going to transfer you out of these enrichment projects because we think you're,

• 9:16Speaker 02

  you know, you're clearly some sort of a snoop or a threat or something. And just a couple of months after that, and I guess late 1975 in December, he left the company altogether and had, you know, basically under his, in his banker's box on the way out the door. He had a bunch of sensitive documents, blueprints, and those supplier lists. And he said, don't bother looking in these banker boxes. The lid is on.

• 9:42Josh Clark?

  Right. He just kind of vanished and showed back up in Pakistan. And he was very quickly put in charge of the uranium project. And there was a guy named Munir Ahmad Khan, who was essentially his rival in, in the quest to build Pakistan a bomb. The other Khan was involved in the plutonium wing of the whole thing. Khan eventually got Bhutto, and then the guy who overthrew Bhutto, over to his side in favor of uranium enrichment, but also in favor of AQ Khan. From what I could tell, he had a really big ego. And he wanted to be like the top dog in getting Pakistan the bomb. And so he was working on the project called Project 706. It was the uranium enrichment project.

• 10:28Josh Clark?

  And by 1982, I think, they they managed to produce the highly enriched uranium that you need to make a bomb. Very, very small amounts at first. You need several kilograms to actually make a bomb. But they were successful at doing it through that uranium enrichment program by 1982 for the first time.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as they're doing this, they're also researching how to get this thing into a missile. So, you know, as you'll see, I mean, if you just look back at the history of enriching uranium or for nuclear energy, it's usually a country is like, hey, you know, we just want to have a nuclear energy company and we want to get up to speed on that. But what they're also trying to do is get a nuclear bomb.

• 11:14Josh Clark?

  They're also making copies.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it kind of just happens over and over and over where they're like, no, no, no, we just want nuclear energy. And don't worry about what's in that bunker over there.

• 11:23Josh Clark?

  Right. And again, I kind of I mentioned it at the outset. The reason that countries have to do it like that is because there's a huge treaty from the 60s that said, okay, the people who already have the bomb, they're agreeing to disassemble it. People who don't have the bomb, they're going to agree not to seek the bomb. And it's still in effect and it's still enforced. So that's why you have to do it. Right, exactly. But it's it's just been so just kind of nibbled at and worn down and just flagrantly ignored that it doesn't really seem to have that much teeth. But I guess it's enough to make countries feel like they have to be subversive when they're trying to create a nuclear weapons program.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So while he's doing all this, and you you mentioned at the beginning that he had a side gig, you know, getting rich off of selling these secrets and blueprints and helping other countries, you know, get in touch with the right. As you'll see, he worked with a lot of middlemen over the years and spoke a bunch of different languages. So he was really kind of the perfect dude to do this. And while he was doing this, he developed that side gig as importing and exporting all these components and plans that, you know, some of which he just outright stole.

• 12:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and he was able to do this in large part because he had by this time garnered so much respect in Pakistan among the leadership of Pakistan, emerging as the guy who was giving the bomb or developing the bomb for Pakistan, that they just weren't, they were like, just go, here's a blank check, do whatever you need to do. So he started ordering doubles of the stuff that he was, he needed to set up Pakistan's uranium enrichment program. And then he would take the stuff that he didn't need and turn around and essentially reverse the way that it got there. He would use Pakistani military planes, cargo planes to take those parts, the extra parts, back to middlemen. And then he'd tell the middlemen

• 13:24Josh Clark?

  what buyers to to direct it to, and then he'd pocket the money.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was very lucrative, as we'll see, he ended up making a ton of money doing this. He ended up having a few kind of major clients. No one really knows how many countries he really dealt with, because I think they found out he traveled to, you know, many more countries than they officially sort of accused him of dealing with. But the first country to step up and say, hey, I really want to do business with you was Iran. And this was in 1987. He helped them build up to 50,000 centrifuges, P1 types, Pakistan 1. There are a couple of different types, the Pakistan 1 and the P2, the Pakistan

• 14:10Speaker 02

  2. Those, the P2s are much faster. And the belief at the time is that he was just kind of sending the stuff that they didn't need anymore to Iran, and it was kind of outdated equipment that wasn't going to help them that much.

• 14:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. That's how it started out. They were they because Pakistan upgraded their setup from what I saw. And the reason why you need 50,000 centrifuges is because when you when you spin that uranium to separate it and you siphon off the stuff you want, you have to do it again and again and again and again. And it can take weeks and months and sometimes years, depending on what kind of centrifuges you're working with. But if you have 50,000 centrifuges like Iran supposedly got, you can make a lot of of highly enriched uranium fairly fast. Which led me to wonder, Chuck, like, what what is taking Iran so long?

• 15:03Josh Clark?

  If they still don't have a nuke and they started in 1987, what's what's the deal there? And the best answer I could come up with is that back in the 90s, the Ayatollah issued a fatwa, like a ruling on Sharia law that basically said, no nukes. Iran's not going to have any nukes. And that it wasn't until 2024 that Iran said that they were starting to rethink it. So I guess just because the leadership said they weren't going to have nukes. That is the reason Iran doesn't have a nuke right now.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, interesting.

• 15:34Josh Clark?

  I thought so, too.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  So he was dealing with their government supposedly until 1991. There was a final shipment of the P1s, but other people have said, no, no, no. That continued for at least another four years through the mid 90s. And those P2 centrifuges started flowing in. Iran wanted this potential bomb because they were at war with Iraq at the time in the 80s over the course of about eight years. So Khan, ever the businessman, was like, hey, Iraq, I've been helping Iran develop their program. You could probably use a little of my help in stolen documents as well.

• 16:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, what's crazy is Iraq was like very suspicious of this from the outset. And I guess they asked for a sample and they couldn't find what sample they were given. Just that Khan was like, "Don't taste this. It's not that kind of sample."

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:30Josh Clark?

  And um-

• 16:31Speaker 02

  You dab your pinky in it?

• 16:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Put it on your tongue?

• 16:34Josh Clark?

  It's like, "Don't do that." So I guess Iraq thought that this was some sort of maybe international UN sting operation? And then around the same time, the first Gulf War broke out and they were like, "We don't have time for this." So they moved on and I guess he never managed to get a bomb or the information Iraq needed to Iraq.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there were documents that said, "Hey, this little, you know, the paperwork was there. This will cost you $5 million bucks and a 10% commission on materials-

• 17:06Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  -through my network so I can, you know, pay people off, basically." But yeah, like you said, it seems like it never ended up happening. And Iraq was probably wise to think that that was a sting operation, even though it wasn't.

• 17:19Josh Clark?

  Well, what, something I saw that was kind of funny was Iran paid $3 million for theirs and they actually were like, "10% commission? That seems steep." So they, they went and started calling up the list of suppliers that AQ Khan had for them, rather than dealing with him, because they were bargain shopping for their nuclear program, apparently.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Well, maybe that has something to do with it, too.

• 17:41Josh Clark?

  It could be. Their nuclear centrifuges were held together with bubble gum and duct tape.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Should we take a break?

• 17:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  All right, we'll come back and talk about a couple of more clients, right after this.

• 18:16Josh Clark?

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• 19:16Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 19:19Josh Clark?

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  All right, so we're back and we promised to talk about new clients. This is where North Korea enters the picture. It's the mid-'90s and with the deal with the United States, North Korea said, you know what, we're going to stop building our nuclear reactors. We're going to stop producing plutonium. Again, we're just trying to get nuclear energy going, but all right, we'll stop doing that. But what we're really going to do is very quietly start looking to continue that process just on the down-low.

• 22:00Josh Clark?

  Right, but Kim Jong-il had his fingers crossed behind his back, so none of that counted.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  That's right. And so who do they turn to, of course? They turn to Pakistan and AQ Khan.

• 22:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so and this is where it really seems like Pakistan, Pakistani officials were definitely involved in this, even though later on, as we'll see, they're like, we had nothing to do with this. But Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998, which really surprised the world. And even more dramatically, they did it in response to a test that India had carried out two weeks before. And during this test, one of the groups that was there was a delegation of North Koreans who were invited to watch the whole thing. And the common wisdom among the intelligence community is that this was a group of nuclear

• 22:49Josh Clark?

  scientists from North Korea's nuclear program who are basically being, you know, run through the motions of how this is working. I don't know if we said or not, also, A Q Khan was known to have gone to North Korea at least 13 times that were documented. Something really weird happened during this nuclear test with the North Korean delegation, though, and that was that one of them, a woman who was among this group, died mysteriously. She was shot and eventually sent back to North Korea, her body was. But on the cargo plane were centrifuges and other things for North Korea's nuclear program, too.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, was that just like, hey, we've got this plane going, so why don't we just double dip and get some stuff moved while we're transporting this body?

• 23:37Josh Clark?

  Maybe Pakistan is the bargain shop as well.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  So, like you said, he went to North Korea at least 13 times that intelligence knows about. And while he was helping North Korea sort of develop their enrichment program, they were supplying Pakistan. It was, you know, a bit of a quid pro quo. They're like, hey, we've got long-distance missile technology that you don't have, and so we're perfect bedfellows here.

• 24:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and so they got the missiles from North Korea through a guy named Kang. He was, on paper, the ambassador to Pakistan for North Korea. In reality, he was the husband of the woman who was murdered. She turned out to be murdered during the missile test because she was spying for the US, but her husband managed to hang in there, and it turns out he was an arms dealer for North Korea. He was the one who provided the missiles. So, again, all this time, North Korea is saying, like, we don't have a nuclear program. Pakistan's like, we don't even know what anybody's talking about. This is all, in retrospect, like, this is not on a lot of people's radar right now. And as a matter of fact, EQ Khan was on the radar of international intelligence communities.

• 24:49Josh Clark?

  Again, all the way back to the, what the seventies when the Dutch started watching him. But somehow, some way, the global intelligence community missed the fact that he was a rogue nuclear weapons technology salesman, which is the, one of the weirdest things ever. But it turned out that it was his next business venture in Libya that led to his downfall.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there were, you know, later on, they were, they were like, yeah, we knew he was ordering double the amount of everything. And we just couldn't figure out why.

• 25:25Josh Clark?

  Right. It makes zero, there's a lot about this that just really smells like a kind of a poorly constructed cover up. Internationally, not just from Pakistan.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So yeah, the, the next client stepped forward and that was Libya. And this was in the late nineties, like 1996, 97. He started trading centrifuges and the, and the equipment and the components, getting them over to Libya. This, there's a guy here named Peter Griffin, not what you're thinking from Family Guy. It's a real life human. It was a British engineer who was involved in this operation. He was like, man, I've been, I've been given, or not giving, but I've been selling material to Pakistan for, you know, 20 years or more. Like this has been going on for a long time.

• 26:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that was a huge thing that allowed this to go on is like the international community would ban parts for like centrifuges or breeder reactors that you made plutonium with. And then people like EQ Khan would be like, well, fine, we're going to start shipping the parts to make those parts and then assemble the parts at the, at the end. So they were legitimately allowed to do this stuff. It was just, they still had to fake what the overall purpose was. So yeah, guys like Peter Griffin were like, I actually wasn't breaking any laws. It was more like an international moray that was broken where he knew he was helping states that should not have nuclear bombs, get nuclear bombs essentially.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So Peter Griffin, Peter Griffin.

• 27:00Josh Clark?

  There's just no way you couldn't do something.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  I guess that was, uh, what's the guy's name? I haven't watched Family Guy in so long.

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  Cleveland? Peter.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Cleveland.

• 27:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  That's right. So Peter Griffin was a partner in the company from Dubai. And in 2001, they placed a bunch of orders for these parts that they needed with a Malaysian company. And that company spun off a subsidiary and they hired workers and brought in, you know, all this equipment and brought in a bunch of new tools to start sort of, you know, turning this into a real program. And Khan was like, for my part, you know, I've got all these blueprints to show you how to put this, you know, big Lego machine together. And he sent at least one engineer, so like active involvement, sending engineers to Dubai to like make sure they were doing everything correctly. So like deep involvement at this point.

• 27:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, huge. So he had like middlemen from Europe. He had designers from Switzerland. He had companies that were set up to build the parts that were being shipped from Turkey, from Malaysia to Turkey, to Dubai, where they were repackaged and sent on to Libya. It was a huge network. Also, I forgot to say earlier, by this time, the Khan network had their own sales brochures that they used to hand out at arms sales fairs, which apparently they have arms sales fairs. But they had brochures by this point. That's how, that's how set up they were, I guess. How established, that's what I was going for. So it was a huge, huge network. But it was one of these shipments that somehow got intercepted in, I think, 2003 aboard

• 28:38Josh Clark?

  the, a ship called the BBC China, which as far as I know, doesn't have anything to do with the BBC. And that was the thing that, that brought the whole thing down eventually. Chuck, I propose that since I remembered the word established, that kind of says we should take a break.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 29:20Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on a truck from your local Toyota dealer.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  That's right. Make a smart buy on the off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks, built with the strength for the tough jobs, the tech to power your next big adventure, and the rugged style for everything in between.

• 29:42Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic 4Runner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 29:58Speaker 02

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• 30:23Josh Clark?

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• 31:39Josh Clark?

  So the whole thing came down with that Libya thing. Remember they had this amazing network going, all these amazing, all this amazing centrifuge going. Somehow, I don't know how, but a particular shipment aboard a ship called the BBC China was captured in, I think, leaving Dubai en route to Libya. And at this point, AQ Khan had basically been under great suspicion. I think he was being investigated by CIA and MI6 at the same time. But there wasn't a lot you could do about this. If you were the US, because you needed Pakistan at the time, as we'll talk about in a second.

• 32:21Josh Clark?

  But when this shipment was found, and it was a massive shipment of centrifuges going to Libya, it was just all out in the open. Now, there was just no denying it. Even Pakistan couldn't protect AQ Khan anymore.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And like you said, it was pretty complicated. I mean, it's always been fairly complicated with US and Pakistan as being like sometimes bedfellows because they were necessary for the US until they weren't. And then, you know, that's when the US could take action. But in the 80s, you know, we were supplying military aid to Pakistan to help support the fight against Soviets in Afghanistan. So we couldn't really, you know, even though we, intelligence services knew that they had a nuclear program going, and even where that technology was coming from, there wasn't a lot we could do at the time. In the mid 80s, they, Congress threatened to cut off that military aid unless Reagan

• 33:17Speaker 02

  could promise that they didn't, they weren't producing nuclear weapons. And so for five years, from 85 to 90, I guess, Reagan and George H.W. Bush would certify that Pakistan didn't have a nuclear weapons program. And then in 1990, once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, coincidentally, not really, Bush said, you know what, I'm not going to sign that certification anymore, and we're going to stop the flow of aid to Pakistan.

• 33:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Which is, I mean, talk about a screw job, but apparently, Chuck, we were so in bed with Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, that we were flying U-2 bomber flights to surveil Russia out of Pakistan. We had NSA listening station there, like, we needed them, big time. But once we didn't anymore, we could start to press them on A Q Khan. And that was when this this whole thing started to kind of fall apart. But again, it wasn't until 2003 that the BBC China was intercepted. And the whole thing was was on the table. But by this time, the pressure that the US had been putting on Pakistan was enough that

• 34:26Josh Clark?

  the president at the time, Pravez Musharraf, who was the president of Pakistan around the time of 9 11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.

• 34:37Josh Clark?

  He he essentially was like, OK, I've got to do something. So he dismissed Khan from the the research laboratories that by this time bore his own name. They were called the Dr. A Q Khan Research Laboratories, the National Nuclear Research Laboratories in Pakistan. And they were like, you're not the director of those anymore. But we're still friends, so you can be a government advisor.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, I don't know. I don't know enough about it, but that seemed to be very much just sort of like, hey, look what we're doing. We're saying he doesn't have that job anymore.

• 35:13Josh Clark?

  100%.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Right? Isn't that what was going on?

• 35:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the US had to put up with it because by this time we were in Afghanistan and we needed Pakistan again, just as much as we did when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, because no one learns from history.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  That's right. So after that 2003 cargo ship exposure, I guess, in December of that year, that's when Gaddafi of Libya said, all right, you know what? I'm going to shut down our nuclear program. I'm really sorry, United States, didn't mean it. And really sold Khan down the river and said, this is the guy. He's been supplying us with materials.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  And and we're friends, right?

• 35:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, apparently Gaddafi was really, really worried after the US invaded Iraq that he was going to be next. And he was right, but it was eight years down the road.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:05Josh Clark?

  But I guess he, he went so far as to show them like centrifuge labs that were described or disguised as chicken farms. And the whole time he's like, it was Khan, it was Khan, it was Khan. And he gave MI6 and the CIA documents on how to build a nuclear warhead that he said Khan had given him. So he really sold them down the river. And by this point, the CIA chief at the time, George Tenet, had enough to go to Perves Mucharif and was like, it's not enough to fire this guy from his job. Like, he's an international nuclear proliferation dealer, and you need to do something much more pronounced. And Mucharif said, okay,

• 36:46Josh Clark?

  I got it, I got it. We're going to make him apologize, and we're going to put him under house arrest. And then four days after that, I'm going to pardon him. What do you think?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they put him on TV. He did confess. He did apologize. He did all that stuff. Said he was, he took the fall. He said, you know, I wasn't acting on the direction of my government. I was doing this on my own. And, you know, I think everyone even at the time kind of saw through that. He would pardon him. I mean, the initial arrest was like a real arrest, but then he pardoned him and put him under house arrest. And during that whole time, though, Pakistan was still like, no CIA, you can't like, same with the International Atomic Energy Agency, you can't come in here and ask him questions directly. Like, we're still shielding him from you.

• 37:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and they continued to even after they let him out of house arrest. I also saw one other little note. He had a jasmine shrub trimmed in the shape of a topiary mushroom cloud outside of his house.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Did he really? Or is that a joke?

• 37:52Josh Clark?

  No, well, at least as far as I think Time Magazine reported back in 2005, he did.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  That's the one time I thought you were, actually thought you were pulling my leg, and it was the truth. So I don't even know what to think anymore.

• 38:03Josh Clark?

  I like to mix it up and keep you guessing, buddy. Got to keep you on your toes.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but people from Walt Disney World actually came and did that.

• 38:14Josh Clark?

  Is that true?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  For the best. No.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  So in 2008, the Pakistani government said, you know, this is internally, of course, they were like, hey, we should, let's just get him out of house arrest too, because this is all just for show anyway. Right? And the US was trying to work with Pakistan at the time to fight against Al Qaeda. So again, we were in a position as the US to, we couldn't publicly come out and say, oh, like, you can't like, let this guy out of house arrest because, once again, we needed Pakistan.

• 38:45Josh Clark?

  We did, and Seymour Hersh, the very, very, very famous investigative reporter who broke the Myli massacre and that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated and so on, he reported back in 2005 that the US went along with it because Pakistan agreed to hand over all of the information they had on the nuclear program they had helped Iran start to build. And so the US was like, okay, that's a deal. We'll, we'll take your Iranian secrets and then we'll just kind of look the other way. And to slap on the wrist that you guys are giving AQ Khan.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so interesting, like with the recent stuff with the US and Iran.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Like, when people try to argue about what's going on and they say, no, it's because of this thing that happened under Biden or Obama, or no, it's Trump's fault. It's like, this stuff goes back decades and decades, if you really want to trace back to like, the origins of all these issues, you know?

• 39:42Josh Clark?

  Back to Carter.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  It's like, you can't just look, you can't look, yeah, you can't look back at one previous administration if you really want to investigate the true roots of this stuff. It's interesting.

• 39:51Josh Clark?

  No, because you had Carter getting in bed with Pakistan because the Russians invaded Afghanistan under his watch. You had Reagan and then H W Bush certifying every year lying that Pakistan didn't have a program and so on and so forth. And yeah, that's actually a really important point. One of the reasons AQ Khan was allowed to continue proliferating nuclear programs to countries the US don't want to have nuclear programs is because the US looked the other way on it. That's a huge factor in his success.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Eventually, he was fully released in 2009. And they still said, hey, you can't, like you said, you can't interview him even now that he's that he's out, you know, United States or, you know, International Nuclear Commission. Like, just stay away from him. And there are a lot of Pakistanis that think he's a hero. Like, he came out later on, and even though he took the fall, he came out later and was basically like, you know, like, why should they have all the nukes? Why should those original five countries have all this power? He had a quote that said, are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads?

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And have they God-given authority to carry out explosions every month? So he, this was in an op-ed in Der Spiegel magazine, a German magazine. So he's very much a hero to a lot of people in Pakistan still for sort of saying, hey, Muslim countries need to have the same weapons that you guys have.

• 41:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and like we talked about all the way back in the 70s, patriotism certainly seems to have motivated him for sure.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And money.

• 41:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he also made a lot of money. I saw an estimate that at his PQ is worth about $400 million. And bear in mind, he's on paper still just a civil servant, a scientist, a highly respected scientist. But he works for the government, and now he's worth $400 million. He died.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  He owned a hotel.

• 41:53Josh Clark?

  He did, in Mali. And I looked it up, and it only has like 2.6 out of 5 stars on TripAdvisor. Doesn't look that nice. But yeah, it's in Timbuktu. And I guess it's in competition to the Biospherians Hotel. They had one in Timbuktu, right?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:10Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  I thought of that immediately. I guess that's the place to open a hotel if you want to, you know, feel out the hotelier, hotelier waters?

• 42:18Josh Clark?

  If you want to get your feet wet, for sure.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. He eventually passed away. AQ Khan died in October 2021. Apparently died of COVID-19. And he got a full military funeral, even though he was, you know, not a part of their military.

• 42:35Josh Clark?

  No, but that really goes to show what a national hero he was considered then and now. This is 2021. I think, to me, the biggest... The biggest shock of all this is that he managed to live to be an old man and die of COVID. Like the fact that he wasn't assassinated during his, his career when he was putting out brochures for his services and the fact that he wasn't assassinated by the Pakistani military because they were worried he was going to start pointing fingers. Like it's nuts. This guy managed to stay alive, but he did. And he was a public figure too. He used to write op-eds in the newspaper once in a while.

• 43:17Josh Clark?

  He was like a public intellectual in Pakistan. He was a, he was a big deal throughout his life. It's not like he went into hiding. He did the opposite.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Very interesting.

• 43:27Josh Clark?

  And then one thing I saw though, the irony of all this is that supposedly his technology didn't work all that well. North Korea ended up abandoning the centrifuge program in favor of plutonium. And I think even Pakistan's arsenal is largely based on plutonium now rather than highly enriched uranium.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder if that was any kind of ruse on his part, but it seemed like he really did believe in uranium.

• 43:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and it does work. I think, who knows? Maybe it's just harder to do when you have to keep it secret. I don't know.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 44:05Josh Clark?

  But one other thing I want to shout out, there's an Adam Curtis documentary. Remember he's the one who did The Century of the Self that we talked a lot about in the PR episode? He did one called Hyper Normalization and it covers a lot of Gaddafi and Libya throughout the years and his relationship with the US. And basically makes the, the, has the theory that Gaddafi was essentially a international punching bag for the US for show that the, the US beat up on, kind of with his agreement, tacit agreement. Because the US wasn't able or didn't think it was able to take on the real issue in the Middle East, which was Syria,

• 44:46Josh Clark?

  the real strong man in the Middle East. So they made Gaddafi look like a strong man that he wasn't so that they could pummel him in the public sphere and look like they were doing something about Middle East problems at the time.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I'll say one thing about Gaddafi is he could, he could rock those aviators.

• 45:02Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah. And that, that perm.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, two looks that I've never been able to pull off.

• 45:09Josh Clark?

  I would pay good money to see you try that. I have, I have a feeling there's a Photoshop in the future.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  I'm looking at him right now. He kind of looked a little bit like Carlos Santana.

• 45:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. He got, he got mistaken for that all the time. He thought that was hilarious.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:27Josh Clark?

  And Santana too, but it was not as good for Santana to be mistaken as Gaddafi.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:32Josh Clark?

  Uh, you got anything else about AQ Khan?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 45:36Josh Clark?

  I don't either, which means of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Uh, this is a, uh, not a correction, just a little bit of added info. Uh, hey, guys, we've heard from a few people, by the way, from,

• 45:52Speaker 02

  from Canada, specifically about Phil Hartman.

• 45:55Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Love the show, guys. My favorite podcast for years now. As a huge comedy and huge SNL fan, I really appreciated your recent Phil Hartman podcast. You said in your show that you surmised he was probably the second most famous person from Branford, uh, after Wayne Gretzky, but also qualified there were probably someone else that you might be missing that was more famous. Just wanted to pass along that Alexander Graham Bell was born in Branford and is arguably the most famous person born in Branford, Ontario, ahead of Gretzky and then Hartman. Uh, I think I agree with that. Jay, uh, that is Jay Hammer from Hamilton, Ontario.

• 46:30Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Jay. That was a short and sweet email and we love those kind. And, uh, yeah, I would agree too. Alexander Graham Bell's probably more famous even than Wayne Gretzky.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Ahoy.

• 46:41Josh Clark?

  Uh, if you want to be like Jay and get in touch with us and set us straight about something, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to [email protected].

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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